In a complex industrial organisation with an Information Technology (IT) infrastructure, the management of resources (both Hardware and Software) is a key factor which can affect profitability of the overall company. A system for automating the management of the infrastructure is needed to minimise IT related costs. It is known to use a Provisioning Manager to automate provisioning and deployment processes. A Provisioning Manager has the task of managing data centre processes, including installing, configuring and deploying servers, operating systems, middleware, applications, storage and network devices. An example of state of the art Provisioning Manager is the ITPM (IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager) product of International Business Machines Corp. A problem which a Provisioning Manager could face is the choice of a new server to be assigned to e.g. an application which needs a new resource, e.g. an additional server. When such a need arises, the Provisioning Manager selects a server among a pool of available servers and assigns it to the requester. Before the assignment can take place, however the server must be “rebuilt”, i.e. it must be reconfigured according to the requirements set by the new destinations. Rebuilding activities include several kinds and different levels of configuration which generally involve hardware, operating system, network, middleware and applications installation and/or customisation. According to state of the art systems, the selection of the server to be rebuilt and assigned is performed without taking into account the logical “distance” between the initial status and the desired final configuration settings.
An improved method which could optimise the choice limiting the configurations activities would be therefore highly desirable.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a method and a system which alleviates the above drawbacks.